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Abstract Summary This study aims to estimate the apportionments of the different sources of atmospheric heavy metals in an environmentally sensitive area by using the PMF as a receptor modelling method and then determine the health risk assessment of the non-essential heavy metals to predict their health impacts in terms of their carcinogenicity and chronic exposure effects. The study was conducted in the northern middle of Alexandria during the period from October 2021 to September 2022. The area was chosen as a residential area, which includes most of the environmentally sensitive facilities such as hospitals, schools, educational institutions such as IGSR, banks, government institutions such as the emergency services police, residential compounds, etc. The study area is downwind from industrial areas such as Alamriya, Borg El-Arab, Almax, and the petroleum complex, so it was important to investigate the sources of the heavy metals’ sources and their apportionments to be able to find the appropriate control measures to mitigate their associated impacts on the previously mentioned facilities and thus determine their human health impacts and predict the health risk of exposing to these metals. The study plan was to collect the atmospheric particulate matter using an air volume sampler on a weekly basis (38 samples) and for 24 hours per once, digest the samples using the Microwave acid digestion appliance, and then analyse the digested samples using ICP-OES. The detected elements were Al, As, Ba, Ca, Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Fe, K, Mg, Mn, Na, Ni, Pb, P, Sr, Ti, and Zn. The concentrations that were collected from the ICP-OES were processed using the PMF receptor model. The sources for each element will be summarised in the following sub-section. The meteorological parameters (i.e., temperature, humidity, and wind speed and direction) were collected for the study period to correlate them with concentrations of the detected elements, which gave further explanation and interpretation for the root cause of the existence of these elements and consequently helped identify the appropriate control measures represented in the recommendations. The data collected from the ICP-OES for the non-essential elements (i.e., As, Cd, Cr, Mn, Ni, and Pb) were used to determine the human health risk assessment for these elements and thus be able to predict the chronic exposure effect and the cancer risk and cancer chance per million for these elements. |